The magic of 'Game of Thrones'

Dragons, sigils and frozen zombies: On Game of Thrones, anything is possible.

Our current "golden age" of television drama has largely been marked by an obsession with realness. Everything is holding a mirror to something, and that something is us, as we were and as we are. Period shows like Deadwood and Mad Men are obsessive marvels of historical detail, while The Sopranos and Breaking Bad offer studies of American families so nuanced we feel like we're at the dinner table. The Wire — in my opinion, the best show in history— is the pinnacle of this, a work so rigorously journalistic it's taught in sociology classes in esteemed universities.

Game of Thrones, HBO's immensely popular fantasy series based on author George R.R. Martin's still-unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire saga, is not like those shows. It is about swords and sigils and dragons and frozen baby-crazed zombies. It has a joyful hostility toward anything like allegory, commentary or social relevance.

Much like Star Wars and Hogwarts and other great Neverlands, Game of Thrones doesn't hold a mirror to anything. It is aggressively false, a work of far-fetched imagination so intricate and finely realized it becomes compelling on its own terms, disorienting and dazzling us in the ways that only the best storytelling can. This is a show in which we cheer on an adolescent girl's precocious transformation into a serial murderer; this is a show in which a character's desire to release people from slavery is convincingly rendered as a conundrum. A recent episode ended with yet another shocking death, a character we're coming to hate killing a character we'd come to pity, to save the life of a character we've come to love. How are we even supposed to feel? Other than, yet again, thrilled.

The world of Game of Thrones is an immense one, and in terms of sheer narrative scope the show's only rival is The Wire itself. But while The Wire built vertically, with each season focusing on a new cross-section of Baltimore, Game of Thrones expands horizontally, characters and locations drifting in and out and entire strands of plots left alone multiple episodes at a time. For a show with such a reputedly sadistic relationship with its viewers' emotions, Game of Thrones has an extraordinary reverence for our attention span: One of the reasons the show's traumas are so effective is that they're so patiently crafted.

And the sadism is overstated, or at least misunderstood. Late in its first season, Game of Thrones took the galling step of violently dispensing with its protagonist, a character we'd been led to believe was the show's focal point. For all the carnage that's ensued since, the execution of Ned Stark is the show's most formative moment, the moment it truly spread its wings and bonded its viewers into a strange Stockholm Syndrome with the show's universe that's perversely pleasurable. After all, when nothing is safe, anything is possible. That sense of possibility — so expansive, so outlandish — gives the show its soul, far more than any of its fleshy titillations.

We don't watch TV to look in a mirror, we watch it to look at something else, something prettier or crazier or just completely different. Game of Thrones creates a suspension of disbelief so immersive it feels almost childlike, some great cultural bedtime story for people who thought they were too old for such things.

If The Wire is important for what it tells us about urban America and social institutions and the moral failures of late capitalism, Game of Thrones is important for what it doesn't tell us about any of these things. Instead it tells us is that for an hour each week we can be something like kids again, and for all those letters indicating all those "adult" situations that precede it every Sunday, that's no small achievement.

Hamilton is Slate's pop critic. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado-Boulder's Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture.